The handling and processing of hay by farmers have undergone a steady development since mobile powered farm equipment has become available. For a long period of time hay was handled in a loose form. The cut and dried hay was loaded by hand with forks or by hay loading machines onto wagons pulled by tractors or horses, and was stored in loose form in barns or in stacks outside. Handling of the loose hay was inconvenient during harvesting, storing and feeding, and to facilitate hay handling, hay balers were developed which took a quantity of loose hay, compressed the hay, and bound the compressed bundles of hay with wire or twine strands. Many of the early balers were stationary, and the loose hay was gathered in the fields, brought to the balers and formed into bales. Soon mobile balers were developed, and the cut, dried and windrowed hay could be picked up in the field by the baler, compressed into bundles and secured. As a bale was discharged from the chute of a mobile baler it either was allowed to drop in the field for later retrieval or was loaded directly by a farm laborer onto a wagon pulled behind the mobile baler. More recently, bale throwers have been developed which forcibly eject the bale from the baler chute into large racks or bins on a wagon drawn behind the baler. All of the balers developed in the early and intermediate stages of baling equipment development were designed to form bales which could be handled by a single worker. Thus, the bales were of a size and weight which could be lifted by the worker, carried by the worker, stacked in the barn, and later fed to animals by one worker.
It has become apparent that it is more economical to handle hay mechanically in large bales than to handle it manually in smaller bales. The economic advantage is particularly significant in large scale cattle operations wherein hundreds or thousands of animals are fed each day, such as in beef cattle feed lots or large dairy herd operations utilizing loafing barns and the like. When hundreds or thousands of animals are to be fed, an extremely large number of the smaller bales, which normally weigh about 50 to 100 pounds, are required, and significant amounts of time are needed for the feeding operations in these circumstances. To increase the efficiency of the hay feeding process, machines for mechanically handling the bales have been developed, such as for example hay stack movers which can pick up, transport and unload a large quantity of small bales simultaneously. Since the development has been toward increased mechanical handling of hay bales, it is no longer necessary to form the bales in a size and weight which a farm worker can handle manually. Hence, hay balers which make much larger bales than those made by previous balers have been developed and are becoming more commonly used. The new balers form loaf-like bales or, more commonly, cylindrically shaped bales, often referred to as "big bales" or "giant bales" weighing hundreds of pounds. One of the advantages of such bales, besides the advantage that, with the proper equipment, a single worker can handle much more hay per hour than with man size bales, is that the giant bales, which have rounded tops as opposed to the flat tops of earlier bales, shed rainwater and snow in the field and can be left out of doors, yet will experience only a minimal amount of spoilage. Thus, stacking of hay in barns is no longer necessary.
With the recent development of the big bale balers, the development of appropriate bale handling equipment for the much larger bales has somewhat lagged behind the development of the balers themselves. Typically, the big bales are handled with equipment not specifically built for that purpose; thus efficiency is lost. Hence, the big bales are normally dropped in the field and later retrieved by a worker using a tractor with front end loader with which he lifts the bales from the field and places them on trucks or wagons to be hauled to the feeding areas. Two workers are required, one to operate the lifting equipment and one to operate the hauling equipment. The bales are often unloaded from the truck or wagon and restacked in a more convenient location for later use. This requires lifting of the bales twice, first to load them on to the transport equipment and secondly to unload them and stack them in the desired place. Some farmers have uses for both big and small bales; therefore, it is desirable to provide equipment for adapting existing small bale equipment, such as hay stack movers, to big bale handling, thereby minimizing equipment investments. It is also desirable to provide a big bale handling system which requires only one worker to operate, thereby freeing other workers to perform other tasks.